Google+ advances Hangouts, photos and videos

A few days back, Google announced massive upgrades to their 2 year old social networking service – Hangouts to make it more relevant among other social networking channels.

The launch initially began with disclosing some stats about Google+ among the audience. It was fascinating to know that Google+ now has 540 million monthly active users that contribute more than 1.5 billion photos every week. 3 updates were made during the event.

The first update was related to Hangouts, which was about the upgradation of Hangout App for mobile devices. You can now integrate your text messages into the Hangouts app so that you can get all your messages in a single place. For hangouts on Air, Google now allows users to plan and promote their hangouts. This can be done by creating a landing page, which would be very similar to the event pages on Google+. In fact, now when you are in the session, you can control it by boosting the volume of the participants through the new added tools.

Video calls, which is a part of the Hangouts family has also been improved. Now all the videos on different devices would be viewed in HD by default. Moreover, users will also be able to auto enhance their web cam stream.

As far as Google Search is concerned, Google+ head, Vic Gundotra said that Google’s computer vision algorithm has now learned 1000 new words and would be able to pick out and find more images even if they are not tagged.

The big surprise of the event came at the end of the launch when Gundotra announced a new feature of Google, Auto-Awesome Movies. As the name suggests, this tool will be responsible for picking up all the videos that you have uploaded and create a movie out of the same. However, you can also edit the videos manually and create your own custom film.